As Jamison remarks of mystic poet William Blake in "Touched With Fire," "suggesting the diagnosis of manic-depressive illness for Blake does not detract from the complexity of his life; it may, however, add a different kind of understanding to it. Likewise, it does not render his work any the less extraordinary, or make him any less a great visionary or prophet. [The diagnosis] may not explain all or even most of who he was. But, surely, it does explain some."

In Plath's case, the conjectural diagnosis of manic-depression and PMS may explain almost everything. And it only makes more miraculous what Hughes once described as "the truly miraculous thing about her," a thing he directly attributed to Plath's fertility, an event precipitated by the births of her two children: "In two years, while she was almost fully occupied with children and house-keeping, she underwent a poetic development that has hardly any equal on record, for suddenness and completeness ... All the various voices of her gift came together, and for about six months, up to a day or two before her death, she wrote with the full power and music of her extraordinary nature."

In a stunning turnabout, her devastating illnesses may not have just inspired Plath but also enhanced her ability to apprehend her material and shape it. Plath's subterranean connection to her female biology seems to have been aligned with the expansive flourish of hypomania's supple thinking, its flights back into the caves and coves of the mind. While she was writing the poems of "Ariel" in the fall of 1962, being "pulled through the intestine of God," as she called it in a letter, she was also carefully correcting the galleys for "The Bell Jar" -- in other words, she was engaged in both a creative act requiring the limitless probing of psychic depths and the organizational feat of logic and objectivity demanded by editing.

When one considers the precision and feverish grace of Plath's last six months of writing, it is impossible to imagine her as anything but utterly in control of that gift. One might say that Plath was able, for a finite and delicately balanced period, to use her illnesses to keen artistic advantage. "I feel like a highly efficient tool, or weapon," Plath marveled that fall.

Plath's fertility, to which she may have gained greater figurative access through bipolar illness, then became both her darkness and her glory -- her artistic salvation and her downfall, a double-faced gift she thematized, whether consciously or unconsciously, in her poetry. No one has ever written more uncannily of motherhood than Plath, or captured so perceptively the shock of maternal otherness -- its frightening and awesome complexity and distance, feelings as genuine and "normal" as love and connection.

Plath understood and experienced motherhood as "much deeper, much closer to the bone" than love or marriage, and yet her hypersensitive awareness of what is closest to the bone -- the aspect of motherhood that is subjective and strange and dictated by blood -- taps into a vein of truth not easily embraced by the usual exalted sentiments. "I'm no more your mother," Plath wrote, "than the cloud that distills a mirror to reflect its own slow/Effacement at the wind's hand." This recurring maternal imagery of chthonic separation, apparent even to a casual reader of Plath, is a clear manifestation, at some level, of the mixed blessing of Plath's female body. It is also why so many critics have accused her of ambivalence toward motherhood -- a crude misapprehension of Plath's anguished and profound relationship to her own fertility.

Ultimately, the foremost reason to try to understand Plath is that it leads us unfailingly back to her poems, the work she knew qualified her as "a genius of a writer." As insulated against easy access as Plath's poetry remains, it is astounding to note how many passionately moved readers she has won over 40 years, and how often women, in particular, will say that they first read her in school, perhaps voyeuristically, and later came to "understand" her and value her writing on a deeply intuitive level only after marriage and children. Her poems continue to reward reading after reading, year after year; they remain as multifaceted, mysterious and bristling with life as the enigma of their creator, who was in her deepest being a woman, a mother and an artist.

"They saved me," Plath told Hughes in December 1962, speaking of the fury and agony she poured into "Ariel." "One can see a great revival of spirits in her letters," Hughes wrote many years later to Aurelia Plath of those bleak months after Plath and Hughes split up, Plath insisting that she would settle for nothing other than a divorce. "And that was the front she presented to me at the time," Hughes continued. "But as I've said it was only in that last week that her front crumpled and I realised the whole thing was a bluff. But then she was going off for the weekend and Monday morning was too late."

When she wrote her last letter to her mother, Plath was on antidepressants, and Horder, who was scrambling to get her a hospital bed, was calling or seeing her daily. Plath's friends in London have reported that she seemed distraught and desperate and was so distracted that she could no longer care for her children's daily needs. On Feb. 4, 1963, one week before her death, Plath wrote reassuringly to Aurelia, "I am going to start seeing a woman doctor, free on the National Health, to whom I've been referred by my very good local doctor, which should help me weather this difficult time."

On Feb. 7, she wrote with brisk efficiency to friends in Devon that she was coming back. ("I long to see my home," she said.) Between those letters, Plath composed her final poem, "Edge," in which the unmoved moon observes the "perfected" body of a dead woman:

The moon has nothing to be sad about,
Staring from her hood of bone.
She is used to this sort of thing.
Her blacks crackle and drag.

To the very end Sylvia Plath hid behind her masks, pulling her veils around her even into death. One can only wonder who, that last winter Monday, she thought she was then.

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